Chasing the Wind
by natural-blue-26
Summary: Set of twenty-five mainly unconnected five sentence fics focusing on aspects of Rachel's relationships and experiences left uncovered by the series.
1. Chapter 1

_A/N: As an effort to kick start myself, the following series will be again using twenty-five unrelated prompts from the livejournal community **5sentence_fics**. Any and all comments and criticisms are much appreciated._

_Additionally the following is meant as a continuation to _The Separation_, and brought to you by the fact that a certain someone mentioned to me that there is not nearly enough Jake and Rachel centered gen-fic. While this is kind of a pale substitution for what I think this person was looking for, I hope they enjoy it anyways._

**12. Double Vision**

Two for the price of one, both halves of a whole, opposite sides of the same coin- they, well, _she_ was every cliché about having twice something but double the pleasure equals twice the fun and two heads are better than one.

Marco had been joking earlier when he had quipped that there now had been one of her for him and one for Tobias, and her darker half hadn't been completely wrong about there now being one of them to keep up the public façade twenty-four seven while the other could now fight the war all hours of the day without being tethered to family, homework or any other social obligation.

She knew Cassie had connected almost as little to her 'good' self as she had been happy to meet the 'bad' one (but that may have more to do with herself as a whole than her pieces parts), Ax had been bothered by the unnaturalness of what had happened, Marco was smart enough not to trust either of her even when one of her wasn't trying to kill him and Tobias… The winds shifted and Rachel watched her not quite boyfriend take a sudden dive though the thermals above the parking deck beneath that swung him from far above her eagle morph's left in a well played swoop dozens of feet below her to the right- Tobias hadn't shied away from recognizing that her separated identities existed when Erik had put her back together earlier but he hadn't been all too keen to discuss the topic since they had left the others either.

Then there was their fearless leader, her serious cousin she'd known her whole life; Jake had been able to work her to his will even at her weakest using the underlying steel rod of authority he normally cloaked in both denial and his identity of the unassuming younger son who didn't follow through on the aspirations of seizing the spotlight- she wonders if some small part of him wishes she had divided better, smoother, _saner_ so that he could have had an extra warrior no family would ever know to miss in their inevitable passing in his arsenal.


	2. 4 Broken Wing

_A/N: This five sentence fic assumes prior knowledge of the events of _Megamorphs 2: In the Time of the Dinosaurs_. (Understanding the canon-based crack AU will make the following make so much more sense.)_

**4. Broken Wing**

The setting sun's rays and her adrenaline rush from the attack earlier were running low, but there is no way that they are stopping yet. Strange vegetation, unknown toothy enemies potentially lurking behind every coroner of this foreign terrain, and her only companion was half- which really equaled _completely_, whatever the Hell he said- crippled; in short, things were looking grim.

All she figured that they had going for them at this juncture was the their friends were _maybe _alive out there somewhere out there in the great unknown, she and Tobias had at very least had a meager meal of rapidly cooling, freshly killed dinosaur flesh diced and served up to them earlier (after it had kindly 'shared' it's DNA with them), and Tobias's other hawk senses still worked, even if he wasn't flying anywhere any time soon- there really was only so much more damage he could unintentionally do to her shoulder at this point that the razor sharp grass of _The Land Before Time_ hadn't done to her shins.

{And we've got you,} Tobias broke into her litany of increasingly violent- the alien foliage before them was getting cleared with excessive and growing violence by her newly acquired claws- complaints and concerns with his thankfully familiar shy thought-speech laugh.

{I wouldn't choose to be blasted back to the time of the dinosaurs with anyone but our Xena.}


	3. 15 Personal Space

_A/N- I am constantly of two minds about David and Rachel's relationship/interactions. Yes, there were multiple times where Rachel was more than willing to kill David __**as an equal**__, whether human or on the battlefield, to protect others or for revenge. However, the fade to black ending these two are given together in series is a very different situation- not only is David clearly the loser with no way to fight or defend himself going into the situation, but Rachel's just been through a hell of a day herself, and part of that involves seeing the desperation and weakness David has as not being all that different from her own. Know your enemy as yourself and then kill him, even as a kindness? Chilling stuff for any series, let alone a children's one._

**15. Personal Space**

As she knelt above him on the grimy asphalt of a woebegone alley littered with fast food garbage and empty beer bottles - the smells from all of this were distracting to his rat brain, even if the human mind could care less- with tears in her eyes and beautiful despite the ugliness of the whole damnable situation, David realized something slightly inane with perfect clarity about his regretfully victorious opponent he hadn't put together before.

Rachel the academic, Rachel the athlete, Rachel the daughter, the sister, the soldiers, the friend, the mall rat, Rachel the fierce guardian who had once backed his human self into a wall and got up in his face to threaten his life with plastic cutlery with convection in her slightly crazed blue eyes and bared perfectly straight white teeth at him like she was an animal instead of a human girl- this girl really had no regard for societal acceptations of personal space.

Even now at the end- or _his_ end, anyways- she picked him up carefully with shaking hands that were impossibly soft considering the death sentence they were about to meet out upon him, and raised him up to look at him face to face; pink rat eyes fixed unblinkingly on regretful, haunted human blue. She drew a deep breath and exhaled once, the warmth of it stirring his fur and making his whiskers twitch involuntarily as he imagined tasting impossible regrets and unsaid apologies before Rachel's hands constricted and something deep within his tiny rat body gave a sharp snap and then-

Nothing.


	4. 1 Goodbye

_A/N: I have *all kinds* of head cannon involving what actually happened to David and Rachel after his return, and this is part of it. Meant to follow __**15. Personal Space.**_

**1. Goodbye**

Looking back on it, there really never had been any other ending to this ethical fiasco once the pieces had been put into play- good luck convincing all of the others that killing was occasionally a _kindness_ given instead of a sin once Cassie had taken the ethics platform, however- and David had been a person (just like she is in many respects) before he had been a traitor or a killer himself, and she couldn't not give him the only final closure she could. Regret was in some ways too strong a word to sum up the emotions she felt in the wake of the crime-that-wasn't that she had committed this afternoon, and at the same time it wasn't a big enough word to encompass all the voices, images, and what-ifs that chased themselves in dizzying, turbulent layers around her brain in tune to the shrieking cloud of greedy gulls over her head and the dull background pounding of the incoming tide on the distant rocky shoreline below.

She had _murdered_ today- not killed or defended but executed as surely as if she was one of the black masked men of old leading the condemned to the block, stake or the noose, and she had likewise done it like it was her _job_. David hadn't truly given her any other options- even if he hadn't practically begged her to be released from the small furry prison of his body he was clearly dangerously unhinged by the fate she had helped trick him into months and months of missed homework, lost sleep and un-won skirmishes ago, possibly (hopefully) even more so than the person Cassie, Ax, all of them saw when they looked at her before or during a battle; unlike Tobias, David clearly has never been meant to be more than defeated by becoming a _nothlit_.

It was beautiful where Rachel left him behind her that day- the sunset would shine on the pile of rocks she had covered the pitifully tiny grave she had dug him, and someone could stand here, watch the world and muse on its general random unfairness; if she played her cards right she'd just enough time to fly by Erik King's house and either inform or convince him to find David's parents after the war- on the off chance she couldn't- before she was expected to show up for family dinner.


	5. 23 Crusade

**23. Crusade**

Once upon a time she had marched across a crowded playground and put a bully in his place with words, small fists and parental intervention roused by the vocal displeasure she was loudly projecting in her first real life 'knight on a white horse' moment; in retrospect Cassie had seemed more shocked by Rachel's own behavior than phased by the discriminating ignorance of the older boy- but her father had sworn her to secrecy over an ice cream cone he bought her following a brief talking to about the ways and rules of the world at large in reward for being his 'brave little girl', and the second reaction had taken greater precedence in the archives of her memory than the first.

Starting even further back Rachel had instinctively started running interference between her younger sisters and their parents heated displeasure with each other before she was barely old enough to tie her own shoes; this sibling distraction and emotional evasive action still continued to this day, but with their father on the other side of the country and herself rarely at home, it had faded by the wayside in the face of other (more fatal) problems.

Overwhelming as the daily paranoia, bloody battles and their fallout was on the day to day, the greatest fight Rachel continued to battle- but never ever fully win- was not the one between humans and Yeerks, but instead the ones between her fellow Animorphs- friends? Former friends? She was never sure these days where those lines lay- combined dependence on and fearful (for some) distrust of her skills and the bloodlust that had sharpened and honed them in the fires of her own temper and joyful exertion. Cassie flat out disliked her methods, Marco and Ax both distrusted her _enthusiasm_, Jake had learned to use her as needed but mostly couldn't look her in the face most times afterwards like they'd been doing something shamefully dirty or wrong, and sometimes she thought Tobias loved her too much to actually tell her what he was thinking.

She'd protect them all using the only methods she trusted until the day she died, though.


	6. 11 Slow hand

**11. Slow hand**

The years pass sequentially, as all years do- some of them faster than others and several, like when Sara left for college and Naomi came home from work to a empty nest who's silence echoed the solitary tread of her heels mockingly back at her, impossibly long- but certain days of the year are always the same in several heart wrenching respects.

In the weeks following the end of the combat some enterprising jackass that gotten access to and spread crucial 'behind the scenes footage' of multiple last key events of the Yeerk war and broadcast them to the masses- no doubt the fool had meant well, but it was awful enough watching her daughter die retrospectively on a screen while government bigwigs made sympathetic noises and murmured empty platitudes the first terrible time, and the yearly revival of the same searing pain via inescapable twenty-four hour media coverage was unfeelingly brutal. The talking heads on the screen could warn viewers about the 'graphic' footage all they wanted, but it was rare in the beginning anyone, Naomi included, could look away- or had the heart to change the channel in the face of humanity's overwhelming inability to look away from tragedy; as the years wore on people grew enough immune to the repeated history of what had been in the face of what currently was- and it wasn't as if it was _their_ daughter stubbornly sacrificing herself, chin up, tears in her eyes, and not a one of the blond hairs she had inherited from Dan out of place.

The footage always played in real time, but for her the moment in time immediately before Rachel's death always seemed to measurably slow; the polar bear's claws suspended in cruel limbo before speeding forward to rip into her oldest daughter's unprotected, fragile, _human_ flesh.

She tries not to think about how long that last moment had been for Rachel- every specialist Naomi has ever tracked down and grilled about human neurology always swears her daughter hadn't had time to suffer, but all too often she worries that this 'fact' might not be true.


	7. 20 No Worries

_A/N: Other than the fact that the amount of angst in this five sentence series is killing even me (and the fact that the prompt was practically begging for this), I really have no excuse for the following. Thank you to anyone who's read and reviewed!_

**20. No Worries**

{Marco, let's recap here for a second- you have us breaking into your biology teacher's room in cockroach morph, _which I hate doing_, because you told us you supposedly have picked up signs that she's a Controller.}

{Yeah, so? Hakuna matata, Xena- we'll be in and out of here before you favorite teen melodrama is over.}

{Then why, exactly, are you scanning her desk for test scores right now?}

In retrospect, she figured Jake would be happy to know that no one was around to hear the small thought speech screams as one roach battle-rammed another off the edge of the desk into the empty air beyond.


	8. 16 Stormy Weather

_A/N- I wrote fluffy gen-fic. I really have no explaination for this, but I hope any readers enjoy the change of pace. (Also fills with_rainfalls prompt 'Storm' on comment_fic on livejournal.) _

**16. Stormy Weather**

The tradition starts with Tobias, but she practically has to threaten him death and dismemberment (or at least emotional blackmail) before he swallows his pride and sheepishly shows up on her windowsill for the first time on a night when Mother Nature throws a large enough tantrum that there's no way simple tree branches can make more than a passing attempts at keeping him dry- if Rachel deliberately leaves books by authors she's learned he likes out from then on, well, it's not bribery if the act itself is never specifically discussed or mentioned in conversation.

As time passes Ax tags along with Tobias occasionally, mostly on nights Rachel slips that Naomi has recently stocked up on certain human 'delicacies' like Cheez-its or Rocky Road ice cream. It's some of the weirdest un-slumber parties of her life or not exactly dates she ever has with Tobias with Ax along as the third inquisitive wheel, but like a million other things from the war she never could have imagined getting used to in the beginning, the rainy nights become a strangely 'normal' break from their usual chaos; listening to Tobias try and explain the phrase 'raining cats and dogs' to Ax had made her laugh (quietly) into her pillow until happy, stress-relieving tears ran down her cheeks.

The first dreary night Marco tags along- the excuse that his father is too enthralled playing with alien technology to notice his absence she buys, but the crack about always wanting to sleep in a pretty girl's room she deals him a dead arm with one hand and smothers his undignified squawk with the other- she kicks him out as soon as the weather lets up, but in the months after they all settle into an almost cozy anti-parental covert operation she double and triple checks her door's lock over; her mother would _kill_ her for having a boy in her room unsupervised before she even processed the fact that there was a furry, blue, four-legged, stalk-eyed alien hanging out near her daughter's desk.

As a child Rachel had never feared the bright, noisy vengeance raining down from the heavens, but it's as a teenager she learns to love the rain, lightning and thunder that heralds her war 'family' gathering together away from more than one kind of storm.


End file.
